No One Else in the Room
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Alcibiades — ὑπήκουσεν, ὅμως δʼ οὖν χρόνῳ ἐπείσθη. ἐπειδὴ δὲ ἀφίκετο τὸ πρῶτον, δειπνήσας ἀπιέναι ἐβούλετο. καὶ τότε μὲν αἰσχυνόμενος ἀφῆκα αὐτόν· αὖθις δʼ ἐπιβουλεύσας, ἐπειδὴ ἐδεδειπνήκεμεν διελεγόμην ἀεὶ πόρρω τῶν νυκτῶν, καὶ ἐπειδὴ ἐβούλετο ἀπιέναι, σκηπτόμενος ὅτι ὀψὲ εἴη, προσηνάγκασα αὐτὸν μένειν. ἀνεπαύετο οὖν ἐν τῇ ἐχομένῃ ἐμοῦ κλίνῃ, ἐν ᾗπερ ἐδείπνει, καὶ οὐδεὶς ἐν τῷ οἰκήματι ἄλλος καθηῦδεν ἢ
He gave way — though even so, it took time, he was won over. The first time he came, once he'd dined he wanted to leave. That time, out of embarrassment, I let him go. But scheming again, once we had dined I kept talking, on and on, deep into the night, and when he wanted to leave, pleading it was late, I forced him to stay. So he lay down to rest on the couch next to mine — the very one he had dined on — and no one else in the room was sleeping but…
Continuing from 217c: Socrates comes around to dining with Alcibiades, though not quickly. The first time, he wants to leave the moment dinner ends and Alcibiades, embarrassed, lets him go; scheming again, Alcibiades keeps him talking deep into the night and then uses the lateness itself as grounds to make him stay over, on the couch next to his own.
The verbs do the confessing that Alcibiades never quite does in his own voice. ἐπιβουλεύσας, ‘having plotted,’ is a war-and-politics word — Thucydides uses it for cities scheming against cities — and Alcibiades drops it on a dinner invitation without apparent irony, the same reflex that will make him an actual conspirator against Athens a few years after this party. σκηπτόμενος is just as legal-sounding: it is the verb for pleading an excuse in court, propping up a claim on a pretext (the root sense is ‘leaning on a staff’). He does not simply keep Socrates late; he manufactures the lateness as grounds, then uses his own manufactured grounds to compel him — προσηνάγκασα, a verb with real physical force in it. Against Socrates, who elsewhere in this speech is the one description resists and reduces to formula, Alcibiades keeps reaching for the vocabulary of siege and coercion.
Then the payoff, delivered as flatly as an inventory: the couch was ἐχομένη ἐμοῦ, ‘held next to mine’ — ἔχω is the verb Greek uses equally for holding a cup, holding a border, and holding a person, and Alcibiades chooses the participle that makes the furniture sound possessed rather than merely adjacent. κλίνη is the ordinary word for a dining-couch, but it is also the word Greek uses for a marriage bed — the same noun serves both scenes, and Alcibiades has just spent two sentences on very small tactics to move Socrates from the first kind of κλίνη to what he is hoping will become the second. The detail that no one else was sleeping in the room belongs to Herodotus-style scene-setting (compare the empty room before Gyges and Candaules' wife, Histories 1.8–9) — it exists to certify that whatever happens next has no witness but the two men and, now, the room full of listeners Alcibiades is telling it to.
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